The present invention relates to an animal food product having an improved degree of palatability wherein a significant portion of the edible protein in the animal product is provided by a filamentous fungal biomass.
Animal foods such as pet foods have been sold as three distinct types of product. A dry product is generally characterized as a pet food product which has a moisture content below about 15% by weight and comprises a mixture of proteinaceous and farinaceous grains or other materials that are extruded and dried to ambient moisture to provide a product that is highly palatable and convenient for a consumer to feed a pet. Intermediate moisture or so called "soft-moist" pet foods generally have a higher moisture content of about 15 to 45% by weight and while they contain similar ingredients as compared to a dry pet food they often will include fresh meat as an ingredient. Soft Moist products, however, required the addition of various materials to provide microbiological and antimycotic stability for the product. These additions quite often lower the palatability of the pet food.
High moisture pet food products, generally have a moisture content exceeding 45% by weight and for the most part contain meat as the primary ingredient. Typically these products are sterilized and canned. More recently various proteinaceous ingredients have been considered to be desirable to add to canned or high moisture pet food products for improving the characteristics of these products. Such a product is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,865,966 in which an expanded vegetable protein chunk is included with the ingredients to provide a canned or high moisture pet food product which has a highly desirable appearance. While the use of expanded vegetable protein chunks such as those described above have lowered the ingredient cost to a producer of canned pet food, the cost of meat is these products is still the limiting factor insofar as the cost and availability of this type of product.
It has been recognized, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,039,687, that a portion of the meat contained in a pet food can be replaced with a synthetic protein which is produced by the fermentation of yeast on hydrocarbons. While the addition of synthetic protein grown on a hydrocarbon substrate may have at one time provided a means of reducing the overall cost of the product, synthetic protein produced by the fermentation of various organisms on hydrocarbons has itself become a fairly expensive product because of the high cost of petroleum hydrocarbons used for the substrate.
Therefore a need still exits for a proteinaceous ingredient that can be added to animal food products particularly high moisture animal food products containing meat that provides an effective and palatable substitute for meat yet provide a source of protein that is economical and reliable to use and provides a cost advantage to the producer.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an animal food product having an improved degree of palatability.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a high moisture animal food product having an improved degree of palatability in which a portion of the protein is replaced by a filamentous fungal biomass.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide an animal food product in which a portion of the fresh meat is replaced with a filamentous fungal biomass to provide a high moisture pet food product of improved palatability to animals such as cats and dogs. These and other objects of the present invention will be apparent from the following description.